Tractor Trailer Crashes Claim More Than 5,000 Lives a Year
More than 5,000 auto occupants and truckers will die this year in highway tractor trailer crashes. In many cases, active speed governors could have made the difference between life and death. This nation's indispensable, vital system of transporting essential goods on big trucks is critical to our economy and to our quality of life. Virtually everything we touch in the course of a day came to us on a truck, and anyone who realizes that cannot be anti-trucker. Indeed, we must take steps to strengthen the trucking industry and to ensure its long-term vitality and effectiveness by helping decrease tractor trailer crashes. And that means, among other things, we must make the industry safer for everyone - for the professional drivers behind the wheels of the 18-wheelers and for the amateurs in the four-wheelers. (With more than 1,000 highway fatalities among truckers annually, it has been documented that long-haul truck driving is the deadliest profession in America).
Learn more about ways to help decrease tractor trailer crashes.
Speed Governors Offer Best Option to Reduce Crashes
Of all the proposed solutions to reduce the alarming trucker/auto occupant death rate currently being discussed on the local, state and national level, the option of activating speed governors on 18-wheelers to keep them from going over 68 miles per hour would be the easiest to implement. Many truckers, regulators, policy makers and car drivers agree that requiring activation of these governors on trucks with 10 wheels or more is a workable option that should be required. They seem to agree that the best solution for reducing tractor trailer accidents is by reducing speed.
The 70,000-pound tractor trailer truck that was unable to stop and crushed our son's car from behind in 2002, killing him and injuring his brother, was speeding with his cruise control set at 8 miles over the posted speed limit. No one can be certain, but if there had been a speed governor activated on that truck that day, Cullum might still be here.